This past Friday I attended my very first career fair.  I’m only a sophomore, so I was one of a few in the crowd, but learned a lot from the upperclassmen walking around in professional dress, ready to find the company they’d start their career at.

The fair was hosted by Harvey Mudd College but open to student from any of the five Claremont Colleges and boasted over 90 employers.  The line went on for a long time, but once I got into the lobby area, I typed my personal information on the computer “Name,” “Major,” “School,” “Year,” and pressed enter and out printed my personalized name tag.  I placed my nametag on my right shoulder, as instructed, and walked in.

There were tables and tables of employers lined up from wall to wall and even around the edges.  They were mostly tech firms and companies, as the fair was at Harvey Mudd, largely known for Computer Science, Engineering, and Math Students.  There were tables for companies from Amazon.com to Google, from Apple to LinkedIn, and from NBC Universal to Hulu.  The names didn’t stop there and there were long lines for some companies that I’d never heard of.

I perused the entire fair before I stopped and any tables and tried to understand the process people went through when approaching tables, realizing that I probably should have a pitch of some sort ready when I went up to talk to my first recruiter.  I carried around my resumes for 10 minutes or so deciding exactly which companies I wanted to give them to.  In walking around, many of the recruiters were talking to the students about their graduation year, which scared me a little bit… Would they even want to talk to someone who was still a sophomore?

Finally, I stopped at my first table.  I spoke to her about my major, Organizational Studies, and my current interests, Marketing and Human Resources.  I realized before I even decided to go to the fair that these companies were looking for computer science and engineering majors for the most part, and that’s why they signed up for a job fair at Harvey Mudd, but the companies I talked to all took my resume and happily discussed the opportunities they had for internships in Marketing and Human Resources.

By the time I left, I had only talked to a couple companies, but companies that I was really interested in.  Each of the companies I knew about before I came in, which helped the conversation flow a little bit more.

In hindsight, I wish that I had looked at the list of employers attending on Claremont Connect and done my research on all the companies, which would have allowed me to go in with a specific list and allow me to tell the companies why I was interested in them and what I was looking for as far as opportunities were concerned in the future.

The experience was helpful, without a doubt, and allowed me to understand what to do in the future when attending large job fairs around the Claremont campuses as well as off campus job fairs.